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Paper short abstract:

This paper critically analyses court proceedings that document the persecution of Afro-Brazilian spiritual communities in the 19th-C., pointing out methodological and epistemological shifts to build a history of human and more-than-human alliances and conflicts in the last years of slavery.

Paper long abstract:

Leaves and roots of Anamu, Tinguaciba, Tiririca, and Bitter Mellon; the bush and the forest; mangrove, river and sea; free, freed, and enslaved black women and men; ancestral beings; roosters and goats: through the crevices and fissures between plantations that carved up the landscape of late 19th-century Rio de Janeiro, sprung alliances between human and more-than-human actors that disturbed the order of slavery and monoculture.

This paper develops a critical analysis of police investigations and court proceedings that document the persecution of Afro-Brazilian spiritual communities between 1859 and 1890. Through the study of cases of spiritual leaders such as Evaristo Antônio da Costa, Juca Rosa and Anna Luiza do Nascimento, I explore the sounds and silences–the possibilities and limitations–of state archives in the building of Afro-Brazilian intellectual and environmental history. These leaders, alongside their more-than-human counterparts, took actions to harbor runaway enslaved workers, poison enslavers, and increase the health and wealth of their communities.

In conversation with the fields of social history, Black studies, decolonial studies and anthropology, this paper points out key methodological and epistemological shifts necessary to a study of the fugitive ecologies human and more-than-human agents formed, challenging the seignorial racial and gendered violences reproduced in the archives.